Gilbert Newton Lewis

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Gilbert Newton Lewis

Gilbert Newton Lewis (born October 23, 1875 in Weymouth , Massachusetts , USA , † March 23, 1946 in Berkeley (California) ) was an American physical chemist .

Life

Lewis studied from 1891 Chemistry at the University of Nebraska , and from 1893 at the Harvard University , where he at 1899 Theodore William Richards with the work A general equation for free energy and physico - chemical equilibrium and its application doctorate was. He then worked with Wilhelm Ostwald in Leipzig and Walther Nernst in Göttingen before returning to Harvard in 1901. After taking over the management of a standardization laboratory in Manila in 1904, Lewis was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from 1905 to 1912 and then at the University of California, Berkeley . In 1909 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 1940 he was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society . Since 1942 he was an honorary member of the then Soviet Academy of Sciences . In 1929 he received the Davy Medal . Despite his numerous awards, Lewis was never awarded a Nobel Prize, for which he was nominated a total of 41 times between 1922 and 1946.

plant

Lewis was one of the first in the English-speaking world to deal with the special theory of relativity . In 1908 he defined what would later become known as relativistic mass and investigated the equivalence of mass and energy . Together with Richard C. Tolman , he introduced the relativistic light clock to illustrate time dilation in 1909 . In 1912 he tried together with Edwin Bidwell Wilson to reformulate the SRT on the basis of non-Euclidean geometry .

His research into the valences of an atom and its electron shell created the basis for understanding chemical bonds . From 1916 he developed the octet theory of valence independently of Irving Langmuir . In 1926 Lewis gave the smallest unit ( quantum ) of electromagnetic radiation energy the name " photon ".

He also worked in the fields of thermodynamics, fluorescence and the theory of black body radiation. With the Lewis acid named after him in 1923 he created an extension of the acid-base term . In 1933 he was the first to produce heavy water by electrolysing ordinary water.

death

In 1946, Lewis' lifeless body was found under a laboratory bench by one of his graduate students. Lewis had been working on an experiment with liquid hydrogen cyanide and the deadly gases were able to escape into the room through a broken pipe.

Heart attack is given as the official cause of death , but there are increasing indications that it could also have been a suicide . Professor emeritus William L. Jolly documented in a 1987 historical treatise on the chemistry faculty at Berkeley, From Retorts to Lasers , that even high-ranking officials on the faculty believed in suicide.

One possible explanation for a suicide is a lunch that Lewis had with Irving Langmuir about an hour before his death. Langmuir and Lewis shared a long-standing rivalry that began when Langmuir expanded the Lewis theory of chemical bonds. While Langmuir received the Nobel Prize for his work on surface chemistry in 1932, Lewis also missed the following years in this regard, although he was nominated 41 times for the prize.

Faculty members reported that Lewis returned in a depressed mood after lunch to take part in a bridge game with some of his colleagues. Langmuir's documents in the Library of Congress confirm that he was on the Berkeley campus that day to receive an honorary degree.

Fonts (selection)

  • Valence and the Structure of Atoms and Molecules. Chemical Catalog Company, 1923
German translation by Gustav Wagner, Hans Wolff: The valence and the structure of atoms and molecules. Ms. Vieweg & Sohn, Braunschweig 1927.
  • with Merle Randall: Thermodynamics and the Free Energy of Chemical Substances. McGraw Hill 1923
German by Otto Redlich: Thermodynamics and the free energy of chemical substances. Springer Verlag, Vienna 1927.

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ biographical data, publications and Academic pedigree of Gilbert N. Lewis at academictree.org, accessed on 7 March 2018th
  2. ^ Foreign members of the Russian Academy of Sciences since 1724. Gilbert Newton Lewis. Russian Academy of Sciences, accessed October 1, 2015 .
  3. ^ Nomination Database. In: www.nobelprize.org. Retrieved January 11, 2017 .
  4. ↑ Gilbert Newton Lewis: Valence and the structure of atoms and molecules . Chemical Catalog Comp., New York 1923 ( gbv.de [accessed September 9, 2017]).

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Lewis, Gilbert Newton
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American physical chemist
DATE OF BIRTH October 23, 1875
PLACE OF BIRTH Weymouth, Massachusetts , USA
DATE OF DEATH March 23, 1946
Place of death Berkeley, California